Boulevard Brewing Company
John McDonald was a carpenter with a shop on Southwest Boulevard. He came back from France in the mid-1980s wanting beers with color and body, and in 1989 he converted a historic railroad facility into a brewery.1
Why go
McDonald told the skeptics what he was after: I want to make big beers, a variety of beers, beers with color and flavor and aroma and body, beers for real beer lovers.
1 On 17 November 1989 he drove the first keg of Pale Ale a mile down the road himself, to Ponak's Mexican Kitchen.13 The original vintage 35bbl Bavarian brewhouse made the Pale Ale and the Unfiltered Wheat, and demand pushed a 150bbl house into the building in 2006, which is what gave the brewers room for the Smokestack Series and Tank 7.1 The Pitch reports McDonald selling his controlling stake in October 2013, and the brewery dates its joining the Duvel Moortgat family to 2014.31 His own reason, a year on: It really gives us the ability to play as a craft brewery but on an international scale.
3
Order this / avoid
- Order: Tank 7. It is the saison the 2006 expansion made room for and it is the beer the brewery is known for outside Missouri.1
- Order: whatever Brewhouse One has on. Those releases pour only at the Tours and Rec building and do not leave the campus.2
- Avoid: assuming you can walk onto a tour. Tours are booked; the beer hall is the walk-in half of the campus.2
Good to know
- Timing: the beer hall runs Monday to Thursday 11am to 10pm, Friday and Saturday to 11pm, and Sunday 10am to 8pm.2
- The campus: the beer hall sits across from the working brewery, with the gift shop on its first floor selling to-go beer.2
Verdict
could-visit — John McDonald built this out of a carpentry shop on the same street it still stands on, and the 35bbl Bavarian brewhouse he started with became a 150bbl house in 2006 that made the Smokestack Series possible. Tank 7 came out of that expansion and it is the beer to order. Drink it in the beer hall across from the working brewery, where the gift shop pours Brewhouse One releases you cannot buy anywhere else. Everything anyone has written down about how the beer tastes comes from the brewery itself, so stop in if you are passing rather than building a day around it.